By Hamza Faisal
Airbnb is building its own AI travel agent, and it has now put a date on it. The company said on Thursday that the agent will begin rolling out to guests in the first half of 2027, moving trip planning, booking and support into a single tool designed specifically for travel.
The announcement came in Airbnb's third-quarter shareholder letter and on the earnings call that followed. It is the firm's clearest commitment yet to an AI product it has been teasing for months, and it arrives alongside one of the strongest quarters in the company's recent history.
Not another chatbot
Chief executive Brian Chesky was keen to stress that Airbnb is not simply bolting a chat box onto its app. The agent will use maps, photos and other tools to build a personalised, travel-specific interface around each guest's question, rather than answering in plain text.
The longer-term ambition is bigger still. Airbnb wants the agent to plan an entire trip — homes, hotels, services and experiences — with discovery, booking and post-booking help handled inside one place. Chesky told analysts that people will not use one AI agent for everything, and that travel deserves its own.
The company had previously said only to expect the agent sometime in the next year. The first half of 2027 is now the firm target, giving its teams more time to build a tool shaped around how people actually plan holidays, rather than around a generic assistant.
A strong quarter behind the bet
The AI push is backed by momentum. Third-quarter revenue rose 19% to $4.87 billion, beating Wall Street expectations of about $4.74 billion, and earnings per share came in at $3.21 against a $2.85 forecast. Chesky called it the company's fastest revenue growth in more than three years.
Airbnb also raised its forecast for 2026 revenue growth into the high teens, up from the mid-teens it projected in August, and guided fourth-quarter revenue of $3.22 billion to $3.28 billion. The board authorised up to $12 billion in share buybacks. Nights and seats booked reached 155 million, up 16% from a year earlier.
Investors reacted quickly. The shares fell 3.5% in Thursday's regular session, then jumped more than 10% after hours once the results and the AI timeline were out.
AI is already doing the support work
While the travel agent is still in development, AI is already handling a large share of Airbnb's customer support. A separate support assistant, available in more than 50 languages and expanding to voice support in the United States, resolved about 40% of all customer-support issues in the third quarter without a human agent, up from one-third in the previous quarter.
Airbnb said the assistant improvements helped cut support cost per booking by more than 17% from a year earlier. The company also shipped more than 50 products and features during the quarter, nearly 70% more than a year earlier, with AI helping its teams move faster.
The test now is whether the travel agent can do for booking what the support assistant has done for service. If it can plan, compare and book a trip as smoothly as a good human host would, Airbnb's bet on a travel-specific agent — rather than a general-purpose one — will look like the right call.
